The specific identities of the women in her household — their names, their personal histories, their own perspectives on their situation — are not preserved in the historical record at all.

They appear in Denig’s account as a detail about Woman Chief’s household structure, not as individuals in their own right.

This is itself a reflection of whose lives the documentary record considered worth preserving.

What we can say is that the women in her household chose to be there, or at least that Crow social norms did not require coercion of the kind that the word “wives” might imply to modern readers.

Marriage in Crow society was a social and economic arrangement, and the specific terms and conditions of specific marriages varied.